Hello

The big news this past week was the release of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. There has already been an avalanche of commentary, to which I have very little to add.

I suppose what puzzles me most is why anyone thinks that these new guidelines will make any difference to what the vast majority of Americans eat each day. In the past, and indeed in other countries, when dietary guidelines were at least in part an effort at improving public health, the overarching concern was that most people simply did not take much notice of them. Now that the new guidelines seem to favour certain foods previously downplayed, are we to imagine that people are going to abandon whatever baby steps they took towards healthier eating and embrace the new normal? They will, I suspect, carry on eating as they have become accustomed to eating. Some may even find their connection to MAHA deepened since they now have their prejudices further confirmed.

Other voices

From the mountain of commentary, I’m going to share two people’s thoughts. First, Marion Nestle, always a beacon of uncommon sense. Her first post described the guidelines as “Cheerful, Muddled, Contradictory, Ideological, Retro” and briefly explained why she chose those descriptions. In a second post, she expanded on those and added an important additional characteristic; the guidelines are “about personal responsibility, not public health”. This is important because it absolves the federal government from any responsibility to promote equity in nutrition and health, as Nestle points out.

This approach leaves it entirely up to you to make healthful food choices, never mind that if you try to eat healthfully, you are fighting the entire food system on your own.
The goal of food companies—even those selling real food—is to get you to buy as much of it as possible, regardless of how their products affect your health or that of the planet.
Given this administration’s destruction of the public health system in America, you really are on your own.

Marion Nestle will be adding to her interpretation of the new guidelines in the coming weeks. For now, the most comprehensive response I’ve seen is this issue of Kevin Klatt’s newsletter. He digs deep into the full stack of Guidelines, Scientific Report, and Appendix and shows how a lot of the advice is self-contradictory and how an impossibly stringent definition of evidence enables it to ignore studies that informed previous guidelines without actually supporting its own recommendations.

I’m emphasizing how easy it is to knock down any form of evidence you don’t like when you have an inconsistent evidence standard - it lets you emphasize hot topics with no causal data linked to health outcomes like more protein and handwaving about processed foods, non-nutritive sweeteners, gut health and fermented foods when you see fit, and dismiss large bodies of evidence when you’d like to make the opposite conclusions.

No surprises there, really.

As Marion Nestle says, it is hard to object to the slogan “Eat Real Food,” even in the absence of any good indication what is real and what is unreal (fake?). Are the guidelines going to help people do that? The honest answer must be “it depends,” but personally, I doubt it.

Take care